I'm currently reading Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht, and I've
noticed again that my reading pace drops off when I'm reading fairly
dense non-fiction. I'm enjoying the book, but I compare its 812 (epub
edition) pages which I've been reading for what seems like forever to
the three or so days it takes me to read a roughly 350 page fiction
book. Anyway, I am enjoying the book, it's an interesting look at
skeptics and doubters throughout history, but it's not necessarily about
atheism, though that is a focus. There is also discussion of how doubt
led to changes within religion. It's an interesting position to discuss
how doubt defined early Christianity. The connection is overt in the
mythology concerning Jesus's walking on water and Peter failing to
follow him because of his doubt. But later the book discusses St.
Augustine struggling with his own doubt, finding it to be hindering his
faith and allowing him to remain fixated on sex rather than his god.
There
is discussion of Eastern doubt from India to Japan with China between,
but little else for the rest of Asia and nothing from Africa nor the
pre-Columbian Americas. While I'm sure that there was something going on
in those regions, I wonder if this absence is due to the usual
Western-centric view or because of a lack of accessible and extant
historical documentation as everything discussed in this book is backed
up with extensive source footnotes.
The
book follows along chronologically and I'm currently in the second half
of the Nineteenth Century, and currently in the United States leaving me
around one-hundred fifty-ish pages of content before the footnotes
begin. In other words, it'll still be a few days before I finish and can
move on to the next book.
In other worlds
within my life I've long enjoyed crappy sci-fi and fantasy B-movies from
the 80s and 90s, so I think I'm going to start posting up my thoughts
here as I watch them. Before that I'm going to work my way through
Starhunter. I caught a glimpse and watched an episode a while ago on
Amazon before they lost the broadcast rights and no one else had them.
Anyway, I got the first season collection through SwapaDVD.com and I'll
be watching and posting thoughts on the series one episode at a time.
The first few episodes are out of order so I'll be making sure that I
watch in the proper broadcast order. My Internet searches regarding the
show came up with very little so I'm watching it with new eyes, which in
this day and age is a weird feeling.
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